


glasses

by eddieo-spaghettio (ElsieMcClay)



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Eddie Kaspbrak POV, F/M, Gen, Major character death - Freeform, Richie Angst, Richie Tozier Angst, Richie dies instead of Eddie, Stan is also dead, gonna preface this with that, richie dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-19 21:36:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18978817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElsieMcClay/pseuds/eddieo-spaghettio
Summary: “D-Don’t call me that. You know I hate it.” But he had sort of liked it, too. Bev let out a sob, and Richie’s eyes dropped to her. She held a hand over her mouth. Richie squinted in the dark, and Eddie wondered where his glasses were. Was he even wearing glasses when they came down here? He had to have been…Eddie remembered seeing the light from a grate glinting off of them or…or him pushing them up while they stood in some disgusting, shit-ridden puddle as he laughed. Or, maybe, Eddie was remembering a distant memory. Richie, twelve and not yet grown into his long, bony limbs and his too-big glasses and the shirts that didn’t ever really fit because nothing ever really fit him.





	glasses

“Eds—I…” Richie’s mouth opened and closed, and his eyes drifted from Eddie’s face to the dank, disgusting ceiling of the sewer to Bev’s face to Ben’s next to her. His gaze caught on Ben’s hand on Bev’s shoulder, and he smiled. Eddie wiped a droplet of blood from the corner of Richie’s mouth with the pad of his thumb. 

There was blood everywhere. It was caking under Eddie’s fingernails, he could feel the uncomfortable pressure of it on his nailbeds, and it was on all of their clothes. It was in Richie’s hair, on his face…pooling under his body. There was so much, Eddie almost couldn’t tell where it came from. He wouldn’t know if Richie’s arm wasn’t reduced to a sick, empty stump instead of an  _ arm _ . Eddie’s own shoulder ached, the sort of way a person’s bones ache when it rains, and he was scared. 

Fuck, he was  _ scared _ , and from the looks of it, his friends were, too. He held Richie’s upper half in his lap, a heavy weight when he knew Richie was drifting, he saw it in the way Richie’s eyes moved around the room in slow sweeps, unseeing. Bev kneeled next to Richie’s hip, the water staining the knees of her fancy jeans a dark copper color, and Ben stood behind her. Mike and Bill huddled close together near his ankles. Mike’s hand fluttered out at his side as if reaching for another hand, but he clenched his fist at his side when he found only air and turned away so he didn’t have to look at the rest of them anymore. Or, maybe, he didn’t want them to see him cry; Mike was one of their strongest, after all, and if he was crying, then they were in deep shit. 

Eddie remembered the time Mike and The Losers met. He remembered the gravel under his sneakers and the familiar rattle of pills in a bottle originating from his own pocket as he ran behind the rest of them, wheezing and pausing every few steps to shake his inhaler and then running faster to catch up. He remembered how Richie’s long legs carried him away faster than any of the others, though he was breathing harder than any of them (except, maybe, Ben) because of his two-year-long habit of smoking, and he remembered how Richie didn’t run as fast as the rest of them knew he could have because he “didn’t want to leave his Eds in the dust.” And Eddie remembered the way Richie took his hand that day and dragged him along until they lost Bowers’ Gang, Belch and Patrick and Henry and Moose and the others so far behind in the trainyard. They collapsed in a heap of seven, and Bev finally dropped the rock in her hand. It clattered on the gravel, and they breathed hard in silence until Richie broke it with laughter. To this day, the day in the sewers and some ghastly thing they called It as kids, Eddie did not know what made Richie laugh that day. 

“Eds—I…” Richie repeated. His voice was breathy and thin like Eddie could pop it with a pin like a balloon. At that thought, he heard a phantom of a carnival somewhere down the sewer tunnel, a clown laughing, he thought, but It was dead, thanks to Richie. 

And what for it? Richie killed It, somehow—Eddie still didn’t understand it, and he had a feeling he never would—but now, after it was all done, he was going to die. Eddie knew it, he could feel it somewhere in himself. Richie was going to die. Eddie let out a sob. Richie’s breath shuddered, and it was sort of like he suddenly understood. 

In a moment, Richie Tozier was going to die. He was going to bleed out in the sewers, and his friends were going to watch, the friends he had forgotten after moving away for college but not really because he always knew something was missing, something he once had like a cassette tape falling between the seats of your car, just out of reach until you forget about it, and you don’t remember until you move the seat to clean because your mom told you to, and there it is, there’s the tape…Except, now he could feel his grip faltering on the tape again, and this time, his mom was not going to tell him to clean the car, and he would forget.  _ They  _ would forget. 

He wondered if his second-grade teacher remembered him. Did she remember the kid in the back of the classroom who didn’t shut up and who came into class every day with a new piece of tape on the glasses he always seemed to be breaking? 

Did Greta Keene remember him? Was she even alive? He thought he remembered someone saying something about her dying, but his mind was too muddy to mull the thought over for long before he moved on. Did Bowers’ Gang remember him—the living ones, at least? 

No one remembered him, he knew. That was part of the curse of Derry. People were really good at forgetting. It was part of growing up, learning to forget. Forget the missing kids, the dead kids, the fact that people didn’t  _ live  _ in Derry but they didn’t  _ die, _ either. People were awfully good at forgetting in Derry.

“You can’t—you can’t forget me,” Richie begging, and his hand—the one he still had—fumbled for Eddie’s wrist. His fingers dug into the skin on Eddie’s arm, and Eddie clutched his shoulders tighter. Richie’s eyes met Eddie’s, and Eddie saw the fear and the understanding, the  _ I-don’t-want-to-die _ . 

“I…we won’t, Rich,” Eddie promised. Richie sobbed. His fingers tightened even more. 

“It hurts, Eds,” he cried, and he sounded so young like he was twelve again, and Bowers had just pushed him down and he scraped his knee, and Eddie was cleaning it out because he was the only one who knew how. 

“D-Don’t call me that. You know I hate it.”  _ But he had sort of liked it, too. _ Bev let out a sob, and Richie’s eyes dropped to her. She held a hand over her mouth. Richie squinted in the dark, and Eddie wondered where his glasses were. Was he even wearing glasses when they came down here? He had to have been…Eddie remembered seeing the light from a grate glinting off of them or…or him pushing them up while they stood in some disgusting, shit-ridden puddle as he laughed. Or, maybe, Eddie was remembering a distant memory. Richie, twelve and not yet grown into his long, bony limbs and his too-big glasses and the shirts that didn’t ever really fit because nothing ever really fit him. 

“Ms.Marsh,” Richie breathed, and she kept crying. Her hand tangled in his torn shirt. “I think I always loved you a little…not in the—not in the way Ben or Billy Boy did, but I—but I think I loved you like a sister, you know? Like a sister, yeah.” His eyes moved to Ben. He knew he was running out of time. He could feel his lungs getting heavy, and he could feel himself getting smaller inside his body, somehow, because apparently, that’s how dying feels. “You…you take care of her,” he told her. 

“Richie…”

“Bill, you…Audra, you’ll be—she’s amazing, ain’t she?” 

“Yeah, Richie, she is.” Bill glanced over his shoulder to a tunnel leading out, the way she had gone. “She’d have loved to get to know you.”

“Whipping out the past tense al-already? You rea-really think…” Richie breathed out and closed his eyes, eyebrows pinching together and a broken groan pouring from his cracked and bloodied lips. Eddie couldn’t look at him anymore, so he occupied himself with looking for Richie’s glasses. 

“You can’t bla-blame yourself, Mike. You—you called us back, but you ha-ad to. Me, Stan. Don’t—we loved you, too. I’m sort of glad…sort of glad we threw rocks at Bowers with, with you,” Richie spilled, and his voice was getting faster and more desperate. “Fuck, that summer sucked, didn—didn’t it?” Richie laughed, and blood dripped from the corner of his mouth onto his chin. His breaths rattled in his chest. His eyes twitched. His grip slackened, and a tear—Richie’s first tear since this all began—slipped from the corner of his eye and slid to his hairline. Eddie wiped away the moisture. 

Richie Tozier’s soul started to bleed, too. He could feel it. His body no longer held all of him. Some of him was leaking into the world, and he couldn’t keep his grip on it. He tried to hold on, to let himself be saved, but like sand, it slipped between the cracks in his fingers. 

“It hurts so fucking bad.” 

“I know, Rich. I know it does,” Eddie told him. He ran a hand through Richie’s hair. He worked the curls he knew so well from childhood out from their gel prison, untangling knots with skillful fingers just like they all used to do for each other when they were children, napping peacefully by the Quarry. 

When had the time gotten away from them? When had they gone from twelve to  _ forty _ ? Where had the naps by the Quarry gone and the rock fights with bullies and the broken arms and gravel in cuts and small pills in bottles and an inhaler for everyone’s backpacks just in case Eddie forgot his and had an attack? Where had the time gone? Where had their childhoods gone? Saturday cartoons, Sunday comics, homework after school, followed by baseball games in the trainyard. No, they were here, and two of their friends were dead or close to it. They were not kids anymore, and Eddie hated it. He wanted to go back. He would give anything—an arm and a leg, he thought sardonically—to go back with Richie and The Losers to a time where the most complicated thing in life was their algebra homework. 

“Eds—I…” Richie muttered for the third time. Richie stopped to think, for once in his life, of what to say, and while he was thinking about it, he died. 

Richie Tozier died in a sewer, surrounded by his friends—all but one, but Mike Hanlon would swear in the pages of the book he would later write about that summer when they were younger and then more when they were older the last of the seven was there, too. 

Tunnels away, It was dead. It was well and dead, and now Richie was, too. Eddie wailed, angling his head back like that would make the pain less. His hands were still tangled in Richie’s hair, and his glasses were a few feet away, and there were hands on Eddie, now, and he couldn’t see where they were coming from, and he couldn’t—he couldn’t  _ breathe where was his inhaler, he needed his inhaler! _

_ It’s battery acid, fucknuts! _

“Eddie! Snuh-snap out of it!”

“I can’t breathe, Bill! Where’s my—I can’t breathe!”

“Yuh-yes, you can. You h-haven’t needed your inha-inhaler since we were y-young. You can buh-buh-breathe, I nuh-know you can,” Bill promised, hands resting on Eddie’s shoulders and kneeling to look him in the face. Eddie’s eyes drifted to the figure behind Bill’s head, but he couldn’t see Richie’s face. He saw his feet, his dirtied, bloodied sneakers with the white banding that Eddie had made fun of when he first saw them because they were brightly colored. Now, they were dirty and dank and dark. Eddie could almost hear Richie’s voice, still: “That’s a lot of D’s for a man married to a woman, Eds!” He sobbed at the thought and the echoing, fading voice in his head. Shit, he was going insane. 

That’s what It did to you. It killed you, or It drove you to insanity. Eddie and Richie were different sides to the same coin; they always had been. Eddie was a thinker, Richie a doer. Eddie cleaned up after Richie and Richie made messes for Eddie to clean. It killed Richie, and It drove Eddie insane. 

“His glasses, Bill. He can’t see without them, you know that. He needs his glasses,” Eddie pleaded, and Bill took a shaky breath. He nodded to someone over his shoulder, head bobbing in the direction of Richie’s discarded glasses. 

“He duh-doesn’t need them anymore, Eddie,” Bill murmured, and he placed them in Eddie’s palm and closed his fingers around them. His fingers tightened around them so much the thick frames dug divets into his palms and his fingers. Eddie accidentally smeared a fingerprint of blood across one of the lenses. 

“Bill, Bill, Bill,” Eddie blubbered. 

“I know, E-Eddie.” 

“He’s gone, he’s gone, why is he  _ gone _ ?” Bill never answered his question. Eddie didn’t think Bill knew the answer.  _ Why  _ was such an odd question to ask. Not  _ how _ , not  _ when _ , not  _ what _ . Eddie knew all those things, but the thing he really wanted to know was  _ why _ .

“We have to go,” Mike said. Eddie heard the whooshing of water nearby, and the howling of the wind above them. “Derry is crumbling without It—we have to go,” he urged again. Eddie knew what this meant; he felt it the same way he felt Richie’s time dwindling. 

“We can’t leave him.”

“Eddie, we have to—”

“No, we can’t! If that was me on the ground without an arm, he’d say the same thing, I know he would! He wouldn’t leave me, and he wouldn’t leave Stan, and he wouldn’t leave you, Bill, or Ben, or Bev, or Mike. He wouldn’t—he wouldn’t leave us. We can’t leave him.” By the end, he was crying, sobbing, the sort of crying that’s more heaving breath and snot and wailing than really crying. “Please, Ben.” Bill was pulling him up, and Mike was supporting his other side, and Eddie could really see Richie, now. He could see the pale waxiness of his skin and the blood all over him, on his face and clumped in his hair and darkening his black t-shirt. 

“He’s too much for me to carry, Eddie. The—the weight of a person who…who’s  _ gone _ …I can’t, I’m sorry.” Eddie turned his head into Mike’s shirt as they walked so he didn’t have to see Richie like that anymore. He didn’t think he could take it, and he didn’t want to blow chunks all over Richie’s final resting place. 

Mike practically carried Eddie out of the sewers. On the surface, rain pelted the ground, the dirt of the Kenduskeag turned to mush and mud and damp leaves, and the wind blew so hard Ben stumbled, almost falling back through the manhole to the bottom of the sewers. 

Derry, Maine fell that day. Perhaps It was the only reason the damned town was standing for so long. Eddie wondered if Richie could hear the roads cracking all the way down there. Was he scared? Did he feel alone? Richie hated being alone. 

He wasn’t alone, Eddie thought days later, because the rest of The Losers Club was still there. The five who remained stood before two headstones. Neither marked a body. They were empty, but Eddie appreciated the sentiment. Four men stood in neat, black suits, a woman in a knee-length dress. Eddie cried without shame. Bev clutched his hand in her left, Ben’s in her right. They formed a tight semicircle around the two graves, two lost friends because of a single being, an entity. It. This was It’s fault. 

How badly Eddie wanted a joke about his mother, now, or to be called some stupid nickname he thought he had left in his childhood. The others wander off. Eddie remained at the foot of Richie’s grave. He kneeled and placed a ginger hand on the cool, carved stone. 

_ Richie Tozier _

_ Friend, son, Trashmouth, and Loser.  _

_ We won’t forget. _

“Richie, I…” Eddie started, and he closed his eyes to think of how he wanted to finish. While he was thinking, he decided it was stupid to talk to a bodiless grave. The wind blew, the sort of wind that reminded Eddie of naps on a sun-warmed rock in the Quarry in a dog pile of seven. A hummingbird flitted past. It was fast moving, buzzing, and too bright to not be a freak of nature. Eddie smiled, and he stood. He wiped dirt from his knees, and he left with a final glance back. 

No, Richie was not alone. He still had Eddie. He would always have Eddie. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i had this idea and couldnt get it out of my head, and i told the it reverse big bang group chat about it and then i wrote it. yeet i suppose. 
> 
> follow my tumblr! @eddieo-spaghettio


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